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The Downfall of the Lore of the Rings - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

The most challenging class, however, was an advanced fiction course where there were only about seven of us to start with (yes, a couple of people dropped the course). The instructor, one of my favorite college teachers, decided to handle the class more like a master class. We embarked upon a journey of reading and writing fiction that was pretty intense. I remember Faulkner's "Bear" story (well, the first half, which made sense) and Kafka's stupid cockroach tale "The Metamorphosis" (I don't like Kafka -- neither did my classmates). In fact, I remember more stories from that class than from any of my literature classes. The English faculty at my college (now a university) believed strongly in exposing their students to as many different types of stories as possible. And that was about the only thing that contentious lot could agree upon. It's not like they were at each other's throats day in and day out. Just when it came time to set up class schedules and decide on curriculum changes. Or when someone dared mention Dr. Greider's Shakespeare class in the middle of a survey course. I never took the Shakespeare course, and but for that I would have had a degree in English Literature or something. Well, all that has absolutely nothing to do with Tolkien and Middle-earth. But whenever I think of literary criticism, I think of my college days. I think of browsing the racks in the old library building looking for English literature journals which were written in comprehensible language. I think of sifting through microfilm and card catalogues. I think of the startled look on one professor's face when he realized I wanted to do a paper on The Lord of the Rings and not The Lord of the Flies. While doing research for my Lord of the Rings paper I found there had been quite a bit of critical discussion of the book in the 1950s and 1960s. But eventually the critics got tired of saying how right they were and how wrong Tolkien was. Or maybe they just got old and died off. Critics started getting friendlier to Tolkien in the 1970s, and in the 1980s they became almost reverential. Now, as we are about to enter a new millennium, it's almost unthinkable that anyone should say anything bad about the author of the century. Early Tolkien critics shared one thing in common: they were noticeably poorly read in Tolkien. The mis-citations and irrelevant analyses were vague foreshadowings of many Internet discussions. Nothing exasperates me more than to see someone post a message somewhere saying, "I haven't read the book in ten years, but wasn't Frodo the Christ-figure?" I wasn't aware there was a Christ-figure in the book. Christ was a teacher (among other things) and he had disciples. Well, never mind. I don't want to get into all that.

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